Mar 24 End of the Future: Security, Capital, Utopia

Abstract: The discipline of International Relations (IR) has traditionally been oblivious to the temporality of global politics. In recent years, this pattern has been challenged by investigations that make time the focal point of knowledge production on IR. In this paper, I build upon my earlier contribution to these nascent conversations and probe further into politics of time by pursuing the problematic of the future in relation to politics of security and capital. How do they problematize the future (conceive their object, register its meaning, proscribe methods to deal with it) and thereby structure the relations between the past, present and the future? With what consequences? Through what forms of closure and denial of possibility? In contrast to widely held belief that we live in a post-utopian era, I argue that, in their relation to time, security and capital figure as utopian projects par excellence. After elaborating their version of the politics of the (im)possible, I suggest that re-conceptualizing utopia carries crucial analytical and political import and turn to the works of Miguel Abensour as an alternative political imaginary to think about non-sovereign utopias.

Asli Calkivik is an assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Istanbul Technical University. A former MacArthur and ICGC fellow, she returned to the University of Minnesota—where she received her PhD—as a visiting scholar, affiliated with the ICGC and the Department of Political Science. Asli’s research focuses on international political theory, security studies, war and violence in social, political thought. She is especially interested in the ways in which political violence and the use of force transform in the contemporary era and how these transformations shape the structure of power in global politics.